I had one of those strange moments of odd juxtaposition the other day. I was standing at the counter at work, watching the mall traffic wander by, and I noticed one of the many teenage moms that frequent the mall standing at the cookie place across the way. Her little boy was dressed in the latest fashions…I don’t follow labels, but he had on the teeny tiny basketball shoes just like all the fancy ones at Foot Locker, and a really nice outfit. She was dressed to impress…hot pants, lowcut top two sizes too small for a girl her size, hair all arranged, nails done, totally impractical shoes, big trendy bag, and shopping bags from Victoria’s Secret and Charlotte Russe. In other words, she looked like all the other teenage girls prowling the mall around here, babies in tow. My impression was that she was not short of money…heck, she’s buying the cookies I can’t afford…and looking to attract the eye of some young guy. Again, just like all the other girls around, but not really “mom-like!”
Then the song on the radio changed…to “Love Child” by Diana Ross, from back in the late 60’s. A song about the hard times growing up as an illegitimate child in the inner city, no money, no new clothes, no father around, being put down by the people in her school and community, and not wanting that fate for her future children.
And all I could think of was how much times have changed now, when I see young girls with two or three young kids in tow, and all the material things that babies require these days, and no one bats an eye, and few of them act like motherhood has slowed down their social life at all. With that song playing in the background, it was quite a jolt.
What other songs have you heard recently that make you look around and say, “Wow, the times have really changed”?
You wouldn’t know that around here. We had one girl put on her job application that her greatest achievement to date was “to graduate high school without having a baby”.
Unless the percentage of teens having illegitimate babies has also decreased this is one of of those true but irrelevant facts that are only served up to confuse people.
Since the number of children born out of wedlock is far, far higher today I doubt it’s true.
Among black teens (the song was about blacks) three-fourths of all births have been out of wedlock since the 1990s. The odds are three to 1 that a random black teenage mom is unwed, or was at the time of birth. That’s a change. It’s a change if you include whites as well.
409 – young guys still drive gas-guzzling muscle cars but not nearly so many as in the 50’s and 60’s. (Actually, pickups are the way to go around here.)
Here’s the best charts I’ve been able to find about teen preganancy:
The teen pregnancy rate was lower in 2005 than in 1972. The birth rate to teens was lower in 2005 than in 1972. The rate of abortions among teens was about the same in 2005 as in 1972. These all peaked around 1990.
The increase in unmarried pregnancy rates has been mostly among women in their twenties and thirties. The OP was talking about teenage women with children, so that’s what I was talking about. That assumes that kittenblue was correct when she thought that the women she saw were teenagers. I know that the older I get, the more likely I am to misidentify people in their twenties (and even thirties) as being teenagers.
Please let us not equate “teen pregnancy” with “unwed mother.” The two are not synonyms.
Answering the OP, the obvious “times have changed” issues in my lifetime are race relations and women’s rights. If you had told people in 1945 to imagine having a mixed-race president, and women in top administration positions, including a black woman (Condi Rice), they would have said you were crazy. It is no big deal now to have a female doctor, or to see a white woman in a relationship with a black man. In 1950 it would have been a shock. Heck, remember when it was a major issue when a black man played on the same baseball team with white men?
I’m sure whether the mother is rich or poor makes a huge difference in how a child of a single mother grows up, and I’m sure it made a huge difference then, too. Money changes everything, to quote another song…
This is quite a controversy still among African American. Mr Obama would have gotten a totally different reception had he married a white woman.
I would say the song “Love Child,” wasn’t about anyone except for the fact, you don’t find white people in urban tenement slums. The white people of that social economic class tend to live in rural areas, such as trailer parks.
Obvious this isn’t a hard and fast rule, you can find blacks in trailer parks and whites in slums.
“Love Child” has nothing to do with teens. It’s simply unwed mothers. While it’s implied that the mother is young, she could’ve been 40 years old. The song doesn’t say.
Indeed the song seems to really be about waiting to have sex. Of course with today’s advances in birth control, it’s no longer a relavent argument, to wait to have sex, 'cause you’ll get a baby. (I will admit no method of birth control is 100%. Except for Mama, from “Mama’s Family,” method, which consits of “You roll over on your side and tell him to keep the hell away from you.”
Last night my daughter and her boyfriend went to the drive-in. He’s from England and has never seen one before. Before they left I sang a bit of “Wake Up, Little Susie” to her. Now that’s a song that’s an artifact of another era.
For the song slant, the other night, my mom was explaining someone as a “love child”–as in born several years after her other siblings…but I only knew the term as an illegitimate child.
Well that gives the respect a job at the mall asking what their greatest achievement in life was. Those sorts of questions are demeaning. They don’t really ask those kinds of questions when applying for higher level positions.
I don’t know, has anyone here applied for a third tier tech support, human resources or assistant to the CFO job and been asked a question like that on the application? In the interview maybe, but on the application?
When you’re asking 17-19 year old kids what their greatest accomplishment is, what do you expect them to say? I guess not getting knocked up in HS is a greater accomplishment than winning a basketball tournament.